History of English Language: Birth of a Language

SPEAKER: This is the South bank in London. Two thousands year ago, if you’d
heard a human voice around here, the language would have been incomprehensible. A
thousand years ago the English language had established its first base camp. Today English
circles the globe, it inhabits the air we breathe. What started as a guttural tribal dialect
seemingly isolated in a small island is now the language of well over a thousand million
people around the world.
The story of the English language is an extraordinary one. It has characteristics of a
bold unsuccessful adventure. Tenacity, luck, near extinction on more than one occasion,
dazzling flexibility and an extraordinary power to absorb. And it’s still going on. New
dialects, new Englishes are evolving all the time all over the world. Successive invasions
introduced, then threatened to destroy our language. Our first programme tells that story. For
300 years English was forced underground.
Our second program tells how it survived and how it fought back. Our third program
will tell how the English language took on the power blocks of church and state. Our forth –
how it became the language of Shakespeare. In later programmes, we are going to leave
these shores, as English did, to tell the story of how in America the language of one great
empire became that of another. We’ll go to the Caribbean where a variety of new part-
English dialects took root. India – where English became a commanding, unifying language
in the country of a thousand tongues. And Australia where a confident new English was
invented by a people, many of whom had been expelled from their mother country. We’ll
travel through time, too, to explore how English in the 21st century has become the
international language of business, the language in which the world’s citizens communicate.
Over the last 1500 years, these small islands have achieved much that is remarkable. But in
my view, England’s greatest success story of all is the English language.
These programs are about the words we think in, talk in, write in, sing in, the words
that describe the life we live.
This is where we can begin. Just after dawn, in a foreign country, on a flat shore, by
the North Sea, in what we now call the Netherlands. /Birds singing/
This is Friesland and it’s in this part of the world that we can still hear the modern
language that we believe sounds closest to what the ancestor of English sounded like 1500
years ago.
 (Man speaking Frisian)
In Friesland, many people start their day with listening to the weather forecast from a
popular weatherman Pete Paulusma. Some of his words might sound familiar like “three”
and “four”, “frost” and “frieze”. “Mist” and “blue”. The reason we can recognize these
words is that modern Frisian and modern English can both be traced back to the same family,
the Germanic family of languages, and some words have stayed more or less the same down
the centuries. Butter, bread, cheese, meal, sleep, boat, snow, sea, storm.
(Wind howling)
The West Germanic tribes who invented these words were a warlike, adventurous
people. They had been on the move through Europe for the best part of 1000 years and now
had settlements in what we would call the lowlands of northern Europe – Holland, Germany
and Denmark. But they were still greedy for land, ready to move on.
This is the island of Terschelling. The English coast is about 250 miles to the
southwest behind me. It’s from these islands and the low-lying Frisian mainland that, in the
5th century, a Germanic tribe, part of the family that had also contained Jutes, Angles and
Saxons, made sail to look for a better life and they took their language, our language, with
them.
(Man speaking Germanic language)
The Germanic tribes weren’t the first to invade our shores. More than 500 years
before, the Romans had also come by sea to impose their will. Now their Empire had
crumbled and they’d abandoned these islands leaving the native tribes, the Britons or Celts,
to their fate.
This is Pevensey Castle, an ancient Roman fort that used to stand on the very shoreline
of the south coast. The chronicle of the period reports that in the year 491, Germanic
invaders laid siege and slaughtered the Celts had taken refuge here. Not one of them was left
alive. Other Celts did survive the invasion. A million or more of them in England but they
were a broken people. The clue to their fate lies in the word the Germanic tribes used to
describe them. It was “wealas”, a name that lives on in our modern languages as “Welsh”.
1500 years ago, it meant both “foreigner” and “slave”. The Celts became servants and
followers, second-class citizens. The only way up was to become part of the invaders’ tribes
to adopt their culture and their language. The Celts and their language were pushed to the
margins. Only a handful of words from the Celtic languages survived in Modern English.
 In the north, where I come from we have “crag” meaning “rock”, “coombe” meaning
“deep valley”, and dialect words like “brat” and “brock” for “badger”. There are traces in
place names. The “tor” in Torpenhow, spelled as Torpenhow, a neighbouring village to my
own, that comes from the Celtic for “peak”. And “car” of “Carlisle” means a “fortified
place”. In the south, they left us the names as Thames and Avon, Dover and London, but
these were fragments. The language that prevailed was that of the victors. By the end of the
6th century, these Germanic tribes occupied half of mainland Britain. They had divided into a
number of kingdoms: Kent, Sussex, Essex, Wessex, denoting the settlements of southern,
eastern, and western Saxon tribes; East Anglia named after the Angles who gave England its
name; Mercia in the Midlands; Northumbria in the north. Throughout these areas, many
modern place names come from that settlement or use the words they brought. We live with
them, we live in them every day.
The “ing” in modern place names means “the people of”. “-ton” as in Wigton where I
come from, means “enclosure” or “village”. “-ham” means “farm” which might surprise one
or two Tottenham supporters.
(People singing)
The Germanic tribes, now settled down the country, all spoke their own dialects. From
among them would emerge one language – Anglo-Saxon or Old English – and we all speak
it every day. /Man speaking/ Examine the language you use today, and you’ll still find
hundreds of words from a language over 1500 years old, key words ranging you from the
names we give family members to numbers.
PERSON #1: I live in like a West Ham sort of area and I’ve got a lot of West Ham
friends, but, for this game, we’ll be enemies.
PERSON #2: For the home games, I would go with the guys we meet up from the
Topspurs website or with my daughter to other games. And she’s five at the moment and
loves it, she loves singing the songs, the nice ones, anyway.
PERSON #3: I was coming with my son. So we just go and get something to eat first,
go into to the grounds, savour the atmosphere, and watch the game. There has been a few
high-scoring games over the years. I think the highest we ever beat them was 6-1. A repeat
today wouldn’t go amiss.
SPEAKER: Most of those words were from Old English. Nouns like youth, son,
daughter, field, friend, home and ground. Prepositions like in and on, into, by and from.
And and the are from Old English. All the numbers and verbs like drink, come and go, sing,
like and love. But would these words have sounded different all those years ago? In a slightly
quieter pub, I asked language expert Katie Lowe.
KATIE LOWE: They sound a little different. I mean, the Old English for “son” is
sunu, that’s not so very different. “Game” is gamen, “ground” is grund. And I’ve noticed
that Steve says that his daughter loves singing songs. If you’d said that in Old English, that
would be “his dohter luvath tha sange singen” and you can see that that sounds pretty much
like Modern English.
SPEAKER: So, in fact, you can have a good conversation in Old English.
KATIE LOWE: Oh, yes, you can, indeed. I mean, each, each word I’m saying now is
from Old English.
SPEAKER: (Have you) any estimate how many words there were swirling around
compared with how many words we have now?
KATIE LOWE: We think it was in the region of 25000 words. I’d compare that with
an average desk dictionary which may be contained something like a thousand hundred
words. It sounds pretty small. But if you think about the fact that an averagely educated
person will probably have about 10000 words in their active vocabulary, there are plenty of
words to go round.
SPEAKER: English took its first steps away from its tribal roots with the revival of
Christianity.
(Man speaking Old English)
MAN: Let us praise the king of Heaven, the power of the Creator and his conception,
the work of the glorious Father who created every wonder, the eternal Lord.
SPEAKER: In 597, the monk and prior Augustine led a mission from Rome to Kent.
Around the same time, Irish monks of the Celtic church were establishing a presence in the
north. Within a century, Christians built churches and monasteries. This is St. Paul’s in
Jarrow, parts of which date from the 7th century.
Faith and stone weren’t the only things the Christian missionaries brought to the
country. They brought the international language of the Christian religion. Latin. Latin terms
became parts of the English word hoard. “Altare” became “altar”. “Apostolus” became
“apostle”. “Mass”, “monk” and “verse” and many others all come from the Latin. This
would become a pattern of English, the layering of words, taken from different source
languages. And from Latin, too, the English took their script. The Angles, Saxons, Frisians,
and Jutes who would become the English hadn't brought script as we know it with them, but
runes. The runic alphabet was made up of symbols formed mainly of straight lines so that the
letters could be carved into stone or wood.
Those were their media, rather than parchment or paper. Though this is a short poem,
most examples of runic writing that survive suggest runes were mainly used for short,
practical messages or graffiti.
(Man singing in Latin)
The Latin alphabet was different. With its curves and bows, it allowed words to be
easily written, using pen and ink, onto pages of parchment or vellum, which, gathered
together into a book, could be widely circulated. Christianity brought the book to these
shores. "Verbum" ..."the word". Soon, a native culture of scholarship began to flower, a
culture based on Latin and on writing. The magnificent Lindisfarne Gospels (???) were
created in the 8th century on the island of Lindisfarne, just off the northeast coast. A few
miles south, at the monastery of St. Paul's in Jarrow, the great English monk and scholar
Bede, born and educated in Northumbria, began writing the first-ever history of the English-
speaking people. He wrote, of course, in Latin, the language of scholarship. The prevailing
language among the people was still Old English, but Latin, this powerful medium, was now
amongst them.
Now Old English was written down using the Latin alphabet, while retaining some of
the old runes as letters. From the 7th century, we find English itself written on parchment in
a language and a script which we can just about recognize as our own.
(Man reciting something)
SPEAKER: With writing, Old English stole a march on other languages spoken in
Europe at the time. Prayers were recorded and books of the Bible translated. The laws of the
land were written down, and the language soon became capable of recording and expressing
an increasingly wide and subtle range of human experience. And in the right hands, Old
English was now powerful and supple enough to take you to imaginary worlds, fire the
blood, be poetry.
(Man speaking Old English)
MAN: So, the Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had
courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.
 SPEAKER: No one knows who composed the epic "Beowulf" sometime between the
mid 7th and end of the 10th century. It's the first great poem in the English language, the
beginning of a glorious tradition which will lead to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and beyond. The
poem celebrates the glory days of the Germanic tribes, epitomized in the heroic warrior who
gives the poem its name. The power of the language can be heard in this passage, which
introduces Beowulf's archenemy, the monster Grendel.
MAN: In off the moors, down through the mist bands, God-cursed Grendel came
greedily loping. The bane of the race of men roamed forth, hunting for a prey in the high
hall. Spurned and joyless, he journeyed on ahead and arrived at the bawn. Then his rage
boiled over. He ripped open the mouth of the building, maddening for blood.
SEAMUS (goes on reciting): He grabbed and mauled a man on his bench, bit into his
bone-lappings, bolted down his blood, and gorged on him in lumps, leaving the body utterly
lifeless, eaten up hand and foot.
SPEAKER: What does that tell us about English at that time, Seamus? What sort of
language was it when you come to it? Do you think this is a fully developed poetic
language?
SEAMUS: It's certainly a fully developed poetic language. It's very... It's capable of
great elaboration. But what struck me generally about Old English, from the moment I read
the bits of "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" right through to "Beowulf", is it's terrific for telling
what happened. It's a wonderful sense of the indicative mood all through it. It's terrific for
action, terrific for description… There's a wonderful forthright capacity to make up extra
language in Anglo-Saxon. The words are very clear and direct. "Bone" and "house", for
example. "Bone-house"...There you have the house for the the body, a word for the body.
Beautiful words for instruments. The harp is called "gleo-beam", the glee beam, the happy…
the happy wood, or else the joy wood, I think "gomen-wudu". Swords or shields... The shield
is the war-board, "wig-bord". That is a specific poetic energy that's in the language, the
ability to make compounds, which is still in German, I guess, that gives it great beauty.
SPEAKER: How extensive is the vocabulary?
SEAMUS: I think there are 40,000 words recorded in "Beowulf". But a lot of the
words repeat themselves in. Now, probably this is in poetry more than in prose. If we heard
an Anglo-Saxon speaker speaking under his roof to his companion, we'd probably hear a
very... a quicker, a different, less elaborate language from "Beowulf".
 SPEAKER: Would you say it is very clearly written to be read aloud?
Seamus: It's certainly written to be read aloud. The question that agitates some
scholars is whether it was written, you know. But I think the general consensus now is that
by the time you get to "Beowulf", you have a writer dealing with a traditional oral language.
(Man speaking Old English)
SEAMUS: Certainly, you open the book. "Hwat! We gardena inyear dagum" asks to
be uttered, and there are many speeches in it. And it comes off the tongue with terrific
directness, I think.
SPEAKER: Latin and Greek had created great bodies of literature in the classical
past. In the East, Arabic and Chinese were being used in the 8th and 9th century as languages
of poetry. But at that time, no other language in the Christian world could match the
achievement of the "Beowulf" poet and his anonymous contemporaries.
Old English was flourishing. The adventure was under way. But while the seeds of
English had come from these Frisian shores in the 5th century, so, now, in the late 8th
century, a potential destroyer was preparing his battle fleet 500 miles or so to the north.
In the late 8th century, the Latin-based culture of scholarship, which had grown up in
places like Lindisfarne and which had also been the cradle of Old English, faced extinction
from across the sea. These ruins are of the medieval monastery that stood on the island of
Lindisfarne.
(Birds singing)
SPEAKER: It was the Vikings who sacked and burned the religious centre that stood
here before. To these pagan pirates rampaging out of their long ships in 793, this great centre
of Christian piety and scholarship, a pivotal place in the survival of the Word and the
gospels, was no more than an undefended treasure house. The jewels that graced the books
of the church became baubles around a Viking's neck.
Today the Vikings may seem romantic, re-enacting their rituals a good day out. Over
12 centuries ago, their arrival was not so cheerful. To many, it seemed to signal the end for
civilization. A year after razing Lindisfarne, the Vikings returned and sacked Jarrow, the
abbey where Bede had been the greatest scholar in one of the finest libraries in Christendom.
This stronghold of the Latin word, where English was also being written down uniquely
among European dialects, was burned to the ground, its books with it.
(Man singing in Latin)
 SPEAKER: It was the start of 70 years of attack during which the Vikings savaged
this eastern half of the country. Few stories survive of exactly where and when they attacked,
perhaps, chillingly, because few were left to tell the tale. At first, the raiders went home with
their plunder. Then, they decided to take the land itself.
In 1865, the Vikings landed a great army south of here, in East Anglia. Within five
years, the Viking invaders, who were now called Danes, controlled the north and east of the
country. Of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, only Wessex still held out. Old Norse, the
language of the conquerors, was spreading throughout the land. Old English potentially
faced the same fate as the Celtic language it had supplanted... virtual oblivion. English was
in need of a champion, and it found one.
King Alfred's statue stands here in Winchester, the capital of his ancient kingdom of
Wessex. He's the only monarch in our history to be known as "the Great", and he's often
been hailed as the savior of England. That may be debatable, as the idea of a single, unified
England didn't really exist in Alfred's day. What is certain is that he was a great defender of
the English language. It was the Victorians who had dubbed Alfred "the Great". He was one
of their darlings, an English hero whose exploits were enthusiastically woven into the fabric
of national myth. But he very nearly didn't make it. He'd come to the throne of Wessex
within a year of the first Danish attacks in the southeast, and, at first, he could hardly hold
them back. In 878, the Danes won what appeared to be a decisive battle at Chippenham in
Wiltshire. Alfred, with only a few followers, went on the run into the marshes of Somerset,
moving, as a contemporary wrote, "under difficulties, through woods, and into inaccessible
places".
Legend has Alfred, unrecognized, taking shelter in a poor woman's cottage and being
scolded for burning the wheaten cakes he'd been set to mind. But the reality was less cozy.
His situation was desperate, and if Alfred's kingdom fell, the whole country would be
controlled and settled by conquerors whose language would inevitably crush English. But
Alfred proved to be an enterprising warrior and strategist. Running free in the Somerset
Levels, he discovered the arts of irregular warfare and mounted guerilla (???) attacks against
the occupying forces of Guthrun, the Danish invader. But he knew that wasn't going to be
enough. For Wessex to be regained, the Danes had to be brought to battle and defeated. The
fighting men of Wessex had been scattered. But in the spring of 878, Alfred sent out a call
for the men of the Shire Firds, the county armies, to join him. Around 4,000 men, mainly
from Wiltshire and Somerset, armed only with battle-axes and throwing spears, responded to
the call. They mustered at Egbert's Stone, where trackways and ridgeways met.
48 hours later, they advanced, shields drumming against the Danish army of 5,000,
holding high ground at Ethandune on the western edge of Salisbury Plain. Contemporary
English accounts describe the battle that followed as a slaughter and a rout of the Danes by
the West Saxons. Modern historians question that, but there's no doubt that Alfred prevailed.
His crown and his kingdom were secured. And, more importantly for our story, so was the
English language. The Danes surrendered, their leader was baptized as a Christian, and
Alfred's crucial victory was memorialized here in Wiltshire in an earlier version of a Great
White Horse, carved into the land he'd saved. Alfred left an even more significant mark on
the country. He signed a peace treaty with the Danes which established a border running up
through the country, from the Thames to the old Roman road of Watling Street.
The land to the north and east, to be known as the Danelaw, would be under Danish
rule. The land to the south and west would be for the English. No one was to cross the line
unless to trade. In the course of time, because of Alfred's peace treaty, when Danes and
English met, they didn't do so to fight, but to do business, even to intermarry.
Communities mixed, and so did the languages. And English, rather than being
engulfed by the Danes' language, began to absorb it. I'm in the market town of Hexham in
the northeast of England. Maps of the area show just how widespread the Danish settlement
was.
Place names ending in "-by" reveal the Danish name for "farm". " -thorpe" denotes a
village, "-thwaite" a portion of land.
The Births, Marriages, and Deaths pages of the local paper feature lots of names
ending in "-son". That was a Danish way of making a name by adding to the name of the
father. Just on this page, I can see… Harrison, Gibson, Hudson, Robson, Sanderson,
Dickinson, Simpson, Dickinson again, and Watson.
In school where I was, just across the country, there was a Pattinson, a Johnson, a
Rawlinson, and another Dickson. Outside on the street, you can see the same thing on shop
signs everywhere. Even given centuries of people moving around the country, names ending
in "-son" are still far more common in what were the Danish territories of the north and west
than they are in the south and east. Above all, you can hear the echoes of the Danes' Old
Norse language in the way people speak.
 (People talking):… It's a little field on its own. As Willy says, there's a beck down by
the side of it. It runs down through a little wood. But it's such a lovely setting down by
the...you know, down by that garth, isn't it? It's like a little isolation field. It's only a couple
of acres, the whole field. It would be interesting to see a few sheep sold with lambs. Are they
allowed to be sold?
SPEAKER: Some Old Norse words stayed in the local dialects of the north, words
like beck for stream and garth for paddock. As a boy in Wigton, I remember hearing and
using dialect words like slattery for shower, slape for slippery, yet for gate, lap for leap, yek
for oak, and yam for home, as in "I's gangen yam." Pure Norse, heard in Wigton every night
of the week. And there were many others. But the influence of Old Norse wasn't just local.
All around the country, over time, hundreds of Norse words entered the mainstream of
English, and we still use them every day.
The s-k sound is a characteristic of Old Norse, and English borrowed words like
"score" and "sky" and "skive", as well as perhaps a thousand others, including anger, bull,
freckle, knife, neck, root, scowl, and window.
(Indistinct speaking)
SPEAKER: Sometimes where both Old Norse and Old English had a word for the
same thing, both words lived on in English, each taking on a slightly different meaning.
Where Old English said craft, Old Norse said skill. For an English hide, the Norse said skin.
In Old English, you were sick. In Norse, you were ill. Here was another example of English's
extraordinary ability to absorb, to take in words from other languages, adding them to its
word hoard, increasing the richness and flexibility of the vocabulary.
KATIE LOWE: I think the point about vocabulary is how much it astonishes by its
ordinary nature. Words like law, egg, husband, leg", ill, die, ugly, all these words are from
Old Norse, and yet you wouldn't necessarily think that they were foreign at all. Most
astounding of all, I think, are the pronouns they, their, and them. Those are also from Old
Norse.
SPEAKER: And in terms of grammar, in a way, they simplified English. They took it
away from its Germanic roots.
KATIE LOWE: I think it's probably true to say that Old Norse affects the English
language more than any other because it actually leads to a restructuring of the language. Old
English forms sentences not by word order, as we do, but by tacking on endings onto the
ends of things, like articles and pronouns and nouns. And what happens is, through contact
with a pretty similar language, a lot of these inflectional endings start to lose their distinctive
nature. And, actually, this is a process we can see happening fairly early on in the Anglo-
Saxon period. So, the language is prone to do that, but contact with Norse languages speeded
it up, gave it a shove towards modernity.
SPEAKER: Can you give us a very simple example of that?
KATIE LOWE: Yes. Let's take a simple sentence like "The king gave horses to his
men." That would be something like, in Old English: the cyning geaf blancan hif gumum.
Now, in Old English, you didn't tend to have a preposition like "to". Instead, you could use a
special ending, which kind of meant "to his men". And that would be a "-um" ending, and
you just tack that onto the end of the noun for "man". So you'd have "gumum", "-um"
ending. Now, the plural for the word for "horse", if you want to say, "Gave horses to his
men," would be to have an "n" on it. So it would be "blancan". Unfortunately, towards the
end of the Old English period, we start to see that "-um" ending becoming more and more
indistinct. And we see spellings like "guman" ..."- “An" just the same as "blancan"..."-an".
It's obvious that the king is more likely to give horses to his men than men to his horses, but
you can see that there's a potential there for difficulties. And so we start to see prepositions
being used in place of those endings, which had become indistinct.
(Indistinct speaking)
SPEAKER: Spoken English survived the Danish invasion. But as the 9th century
drew to a close, the written culture was in a ruinous state, and King Alfred was concerned.
When Alfred looked at the state of his kingdom, he was a polled. The scholars in the
monasteries had once made England the greatest powerhouse of Christian teaching in
Europe. But 150 years had passed since the high days of Bede, and the scholarly tradition
had declined, hastened on its way by a century of Viking raids.
In all the country, Alfred could barely find a handful of priests who could read and
understand Lain. And if they couldn't understand Latin, they couldn't pass on the teachings
of the religious books that told people how to lead virtuous lives. They couldn't save souls.
Where the written word had once flourished, Alfred now found only chronic spiritual
sickness. He looked for a cure. One way was to educate more clergy in Latin. But that wasn't
enough. He hit on a more radical solution, a solution that hinged not on Latin, but on
English, and he took English to new heights of achievement. In the preface to his own
translation of Pope Gregory's "Pastoral Care", Alfred wrote: "I remembered how, before it
was all ravaged and burned, I'd seen how the churches throughout all England stood filled
with treasures and books. And there was also a multitude of God's servants who had very
little benefit from those books because they couldn't understand anything of them since they
were not written in their own language." Their own language was, of course, English. Alfred
didn't want to do away with Latin, but he realized that it would be far easier to teach people
to read books written in the language they spoke. The best scholars could then go on to learn
Latin and join holy orders. The rest would still have access to scholarship and spiritual
guidance, but it would be written in English.
Here in his capital city of Winchester, Alfred drew up a plan. It was an extraordinarily
imaginative project to promote literacy and restore the English language. "We should," he
wrote, "translate certain books which are most necessary for all men to know into the
language that we can all understand and also arrange it, as with God's help we very easily
can if we have peace, so that all the youth of free men now among the English people who
have the means to be able to devote themselves to it may be set to study for as long as they're
of no other use, until the time they're able to read English writing well."
Alfred had five books of religious instruction, philosophy, and history translated from
Latin into English, a laborious and costly undertaking. Copies were sent out to the 12
bishops of his kingdom for their wisdom to be spread as widely as possible. To each bishop,
to emphasize the importance and value of the project, Alfred sent a costly pointer, used to
underline the text. This is the Alfred Jewel. Many historians believe that it formed the head
of one of those pointers. Crafted in crystal enamel and gold, it was discovered in 1693 in
Somerset and is now in show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It's inscribed "Aelfred
had me made" in English. Alfred the Great had made the English language the jewel in his
crown.
(Bells chiming)
SPEAKER: Here in Winchester, Alfred had established what was, effectively, a
publishing house. Other projects he undertook included the commissioning of "The Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle", detailing hundreds of years of history. Alfred died in 899. One of his
legacies was an English language which was more prestigious and widely read than ever
before. There was nothing to compare with this range of written vernacular, history,
philosophy, poetry anywhere else in mainland Europe.
 English was out on its own. By the middle of the 11th century, English seemed secure.
But now other invaders were waiting in the wings, and English was about to face its greatest
threat ever. This place, the old Roman fort at Pevensey, was a fateful one for the English
language.
It was here, among other places, that the Frisians and other Germanic tribes had made
landfall in the 5th century and introduced their own language.
Now, in 1066, another wave of invaders was landing - the Normans. When, in 1066,
William, Duke of Normandy, sailed with his army to claim the English throne, he was sure
he had right on his side. The English king, Edward the Confessor, had spent many years in
Normandy and, in that time, contemporary sources say, had come to regard William as a
brother or even a son and had named him as his successor.
Sensing his impending death and fearing rebellion at home, the childless Edward had
dispatched Harold Godwinson, his wife's brother, and his Earl of Essex, the richest and most
powerful of the English lords, to Normandy to pledge loyalty to William. This Harold did,
swearing on two caskets of holy relics. But when Edward did die, Harold, supported by the
English nobility, had himself crowned in Westminster Abbey on the very day that Edward
was laid to rest there. To the truculent and ruthless William, this was an affront, invasion
with maximum force the only possible response. The armies met here, near Hastings. This is
the spot where, traditionally, Harold fell, fatally pierced through the eye with an arrow. The
site was later named after the engagement, but it's named not with an English word like
fight, but with a word from the language of the Norman victors - battle. Harold would be the
last English-speaking king of England for three centuries. On Christmas Day 1066, William
was crowned in Westminster Abbey in a service conducted in English and Latin. William
spoke French throughout. A new king and a new language were in authority in England.
Enemy. Castle. Castle was one of the first French words to enter the English language.
The Normans built a chain of them to impose their rule on the country. This magnificent
castle at Rochester was one of the first to be fortified in stone. By blood, the Normans were
from the same stock as the Norsemen who'd invaded in earlier centuries. But they no longer
spoke a Germanic language rather, what we'd call Old French, which had grown from Latin
roots. Many of the words they spoke would have been very strange to the native English, but
would quickly become unpleasantly familiar.
 Our words army, archer, soldier, garrison, and guard all come from the conquering
Norman French. French was the language that spelled out the architecture of the new social
order - crown, throne, and court, duke, baron, and nobility, peasant, vassal, servant. The
word govern comes from French, as do liberty, authority, obedience, and traitor. The
Normans took the law into their own hands. Felony, arrest, warrant, justice, judge, and jury
all come from French. And so do accuse, acquit, sentence, condemn, prison, and jail. It's
been estimated that in the three centuries after the conquest, about 1 0,000 French words
colonized the English language. They didn't all come in immediately, but the conquest
opened a conduit of French vocabulary that's remained open, on and off, ever since. Today,
French words are all around us.
City, market, porter.
MAN: Here we are! Look, one fabulous salmon, weighs about 14 pound. It is a
fabulous fish. We got some fabulous mackerel. They've come up from Aberdeen. Next to
them are the oysters. They come from the Essex coast. Sole.
SPEAKER: Pork, sausage, bacon.
MAN: Nice bit of fruit! Oranges, they're juicy. Lemons!
SPEAKER: Grape, tart, biscuit, sugar.
MAN: Cream.
SPEAKER: Fry. Vinegar. Nearly 500 words dealing with food, cooking, and eating
alone entered English from French just a fraction of the imports which would enrich the
English word hoard in the centuries after the Norman conquest.
Within 20 years of taking control of the country, William sent his officers out to take
stock of his kingdom. The monks of Peterborough, who were still recording the events of
history in English in "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle", noted disapprovingly that not one piece
of land that not one piece of land escaped the survey, "not even an ox or a cow or a pig".
The "Domesday Book" - there are, in fact, two volumes… show us how complete the
Norman takeover of English land was and how widespread their influence and their
language. The Norman settlement had concentrated the wealth of England more than ever
before or since. The native ruling class from before the conquest had been slaughtered,
banished, or disinherited in favor of William's followers. Half of the country was in the
hands of just 190 men. Half of that was held by just 11 men. And not one of these great
landowners spoke English.
 (Man speaking Old English)
SPEAKER: When this record of the country was drawn up, it was written in Latin,
not Norman French...and certainly not English. Between them, French and Latin had become
the languages of state, law, the church, and history itself in England. The writing of English
became increasingly rare. Even "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" guttered into silence.
The language of Alfred and the "Beowulf" poet had lost all the prestige that it had
slowly built up. In a country of three languages, English was now a poor third, bottom of the
pile. The English language had been forced underground. It would take 300 years for it to re-
emerge, and when it did, it would have changed dramatically.

English Goes Underground

In 1077, William the Conqueror, ruler of Normandy and England, ordered the
construction of a special building. It was to be part palace, part treasury, part prison and part
fortress. It was the White Tower on the banks of the Thames in London and it was a
powerful symbol of the way that Normans were imposing themselves on this conquered
country.
They hadn’t just brought armies and architecture to mark their authority. They’d also
brought their language. The French vocabulary of power forced its way into the English
language. Crown and court were both French words. So were castle and tower and the
barons who built them. And so were obedience and justice, treason and prison. The Anglo-
Saxon kings had governed using the Old English language. Now the Normans used French
and Latin. English had become the third language in its own country. It would take over 300
year to emerge from the shadows.
In the years following the arrival William’s army at Pevensey the Normans tightened
their grip on England, now part of a kingdom that extended across the channel. Across the
land, William's men took over every position of power in the state and in the church. Within
60 years, the monk and historian William of Malmesbury could write...
MAN: "No Englishman today is an earl or bishop or abbot. The newcomers gnaw at
the wealth and guts of England, nor is there any hope of ending the misery."
BRAGG: He wrote in Latin. Written English, which had managed to establish itself so
boldly before the conquest, was now dying. It breathed its last here. Now Peterborough
Cathedral, in the mid 1 2th century, part of Peterborough Abbey.
(Man speaking Old English)
Around the country, monks had been recording the great events of the last 650 years in
books known
as "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles". They were written in the language of the people,
English, and there was nothing like them anywhere in mainland Europe.
(Man speaking Old English)
Since the Norman Conquest of 1066, these unique accounts had been abandoned one
by one. The "Peterborough Chronicle" was the last survivor. In 1154, a monk recorded that
the abbey had a new abbot, a man with the very French name of William de Waterville.
(Man speaking Old English)
"He has made a good beginning," the monk writes.
(Man speaking Old English)
"Christ grant that he may end as well." With this last entry, 6 1 /2 centuries of written
history came to an end. Old English had ceased to be the language of record in the land. But
that didn't mean that it was going to go away. Since the conquest, English in varying dialects
had remained the language spoken by 90% of the population, from the south coast to the
uplands of southern Scotland, just a few miles north of here. Even further north in Scotland
and west in Wales, the culture and language were still Celtic. Old English had continued to
develop and change, partly as a result of contact with the language of the Danes, particularly
here in the north. The grammar was becoming simpler. More plurals were being formed by
adding an "s".
"Naman", for example, the Old English plural of "name", became "names", which would
become our "names". Prepositions were performing more of the functions of the old word
endings, and word order was becoming more fixed. Despite being the officially ignored
language, English would continue to evolve and change, and it would endure, resisting and
absorbing the invaders' language until the time came for it to resume centre stage as a
nation's language.
The "Peterborough Chronicle" of 1154 also recorded that, in that year, the people of England
acquired a new king... Count Henry of Anjou, grandson of William the Conqueror and the
first of the Plantagenet kings. A lover of learning, he spoke fluent Latin as well as French,
but no English. And the English acquired a new queen. Eleanor of Aquitaine, the daughter of
William X of Aquitaine. Henry II was crowned here in Westminster Abbey in a lavish
ceremony. The clergy wore silk vestments that were more costly than anything ever seen
before in England. The king and queen and the great barons wore silk and brocade robes.
The luxury was fitting, it was thought, for an occasion that solemnized the bringing together
of so much land and wealth. Henry brought his inheritance of William the Conqueror's land
in England and Northern France. Eleanor, the greatest heiress in the Western world, brought
with her a great swathe of what is now France, from the Loire to the Pyrenees, from the
Rhone to the Atlantic. This was a huge kingdom, the greater part of it made up of French-
speaking lands across the channel. As it grew, the English lands and the English language
became an ever less significant part of it. French and Latin were even more firmly
entrenched as the languages of the court and government of the country. Yet after their
coronation, Henry and Eleanor rode in procession along the Strand, and it's reported that the
people shouted, "WaesHael" and "Vivat rex," wishing them long life
in English and in Latin. English was still alive in the streets. In the court and royal palaces,
new ideas from across the channel were in the air and new words to express them,
00:07:14,834 — > 00:07:18,133
words which sang of courtesy and honour, questing and damsels, jousting and tournaments.
French words, every one. The vocabulary of romance and chivalry was heard in England.
(Singing in French)
BRAGG: Eleanor, England's new queen, was considered the most cultured woman in
Europe. It was she, more than any other, who patronised the poets and troubadours whose
verses and songs created the romantic image of the Middle Ages as the age of chivalry, a
glorious vision that was never realised outside the pages of medieval literature. 1 00 years
before, the word "chevalerie", formed round the word for "horse", had simply meant
"cavalry". It was the fierceness of the mounted warriors that had carried the day for the
Normans at Hastings, and, since then, many English peasants had come to know the mounted
Norman soldiers as little more than thugs and bullies who ran the country by force. But now
mounted warriors had become knights and the word "chivalry" came to mean a whole model
of ideals and behaviour, infused with honour and altruism;
one that prescribed how to act towards one's leige lord, one's friends and enemies, and, of
course, fair, cruel ladies. Ideas had shifted and words with them. It was in Eleanor's reign
that French writers brought the stories of Arthur and his knights out of the history books and
into poetry, cultivating a language far richer and subtler than the one that the first Norman
settlers had spoken and written. The poets rhapsodized about Eleanor, celebrating her as the
most beautiful woman in the world, pouring out the impossible longing for the perfect
woman that was at the heart of the cult of courtly love.
The poetry of affairs of the heart had come to England, singing of pain and joy, and
beginning a line in literature that runs through Shakespeare's sonnets and the great Romantic
poets to today's three-minute pop lyrics.
# Oh, my love #
# My darling #
# I've hungered #
# Hungered for your touch #
# A long, lonely time #
BRAGG:
Shit!
Meanwhile, England's native inhabitants were singing their own songs about things in
their less exalted condition, things that concerned them every day. They sang in their own
language, English.
(Man singing in Old English)
# Sumer is icumin in
lhude sing, cuccu #
# Groweth sed and bloweth med
and springth the wude nu #
# Sing, cuccu #
# Awe bleteth after lomb,
lhowth after calve cu #
 BRAGG: That song was first recorded in 1 225, making it one of the earliest pieces of
English that's still recognisable today. There's not a single French word in it. Words like
"summer", "come", "sow", "seed", and "new" can be traced right back to the flat lands of
Frisia. "Spring" and "wood" can be found in the Anglo-Saxon poem "Beowulf". And "mary",
"sing", and "loud" in the works authorised by Alfred the Great. There's a pure line of Old
English vocabulary here in a song that comes from the peasants and the land, at the opposite
end of the social scale from the troubadours' songs. The French language of the grand lords
hasn't penetrated down to the common people. Certainly, the native English and the French
overlords lived very different lives. William the Conqueror had introduced the system of
feudalism into England and, though evolving, it still defined all economic and social
relations, expressed in French words like "villein" and "vassal", "labourer", "bailiff", and
"factor". In the country, where 95% of the population lived,
the English were essentially serfs, another French word. Not technically slaves but tied for
life to their lord's estate, which they worked for him and, at a subsistence level, for
themselves. While the English-speaking peasants lived in small cottages or huts, their
French-speaking masters lived privileged lives in their castles. Our modern vocabulary still
reflects the distinction between them. English speakers tended the living cattle which we still
call by the Old English words of ox or cow. French speakers ate the prepared meat which
came to the table, which we call by the French word, beef. In the same way, the English
sheep became the French mutton, calf became veal, deer, venison, and pig, pork. English
animal, French meat in every case. The English laboured. The French feasted. Where
English underlings and French masters lived and worked together, the boundaries between
their languages inevitably wore away and the vocabularies of court and countryside mingled.
For example, local men would have been involved in the training and flying of a nobleman's
hawks. And some now common words have come to us from falconry. The word "falcon"
itself comes from French, as does "leash", which referred to the strip of material used to
secure the bird, and "block", on which the bird stood. Our word "codger" comes from the
often elderly man who assisted the falconer by carrying the hawks on a cadge or cage. "Bate"
described the bird beating its wings and trying to fly away. "Check" meant at first refusing to
come to the fist. Our word "lure" comes from the leather device
still used in training and recalling the hawk. "Quarry" was the reward given to the falcon for
making a kill. When a bird moulted, she was said to mew, and from that, came the name of
the buildings where hawks were kept, mews. Today, that name can still be seen attached to
streets where estate agents rather than hawks hunt their quarry. We've just heard nine French
words that came into English from one activity alone. Steadily, French vocabulary was
pouring over English. The French influence on the English language as a whole is enormous
in terms of vocabulary, not in terms of grammar, but in terms of vocabulary, it's unmatched
by any other language. For example, "fruit" replaces the Old English "waestm". Pretty
quickly, within the space of about 40 or 50 years, "waestm" simply isn't used. But the
majority of words don't replace Old English. They stand side by side with them. So we have
a word like "apple" in Old English, meant any kind of fruit, whereas what happens is,
because "fruit" comes in and basically expresses that, "apple" starts to mean a very specific
sort of a fruit. I think it's not true to say that, generally speaking, French words came into the
language and ousted the Old English words out of it. Generally, what seems to happen is that
the Old English word simply narrows in meaning.
BRAGG: It was now almost 150 years since the Norman Conquest. Though the people at the
top had changed, the ascendancy of French was still absolute. Written English, that
triumphant achievement of Alfred and English scholars, was dead, and spoken English was
being progressively colonized throughout society by French words. But the balance of power
and of languages was about to shift. Of course, early 1 3th century English society consisted
of more than English peasants grubbing the land and French-speaking nobility lording it in
their castles.
Trade was on the increase. The wool trade in particular made parts of England rich. On the
proceeds,
grand churches were built even in modest villages like this one at Northleach in the
Cotswolds.
Services would, of course, be conducted in Latin.
[Choir singing in Latin]
Towns were growing, sometimes French and English towns together as at Norwich and
Nottingham. Then, as now, London was the magnet. Its population would double in the
course of the 13th century. As feudalism loosened its grip, English speakers would flood in
from the country Iooking for opportunities,
a better life. Already established were the French-speaking court officials, administrators,
lawyers, and merchants, but also craftsmen who gave us the French names for some tools of
the trade.
Measure, mallet, chisel, pulley, bucket, trowel. This is Petty France in London. Its name
shows that it originally housed a community of French immigrants. In the early Middle
Ages, there were areas like this in many English towns, home to craftsmen and merchants
who had come here from Normandy.
English and French speakers met and mingled in these places, and the English middle classes
picked up French words by the thousand. Merchant, money, price, discount, bargain,
contract, partner, embezzle. The English didn't just borrow French vocabulary. They took
their names. Then, as now, names were a matter of fashion and the fashion in the early 13th
century was for French. So out went the good Old English Ethelberts, Aelfrics and
Athelstanes, Dunstans, Wulfstanes, and Wulfrics, and in came the new-fangled
Richards and Roberts, Simons and Stephens, Johns, Jeffreys, and, most popular of all,
Williams. It seemed that everywhere French was the name of the game. If this process had
continued whereby French percolated and penetrated into every area of English society, then
French could eventually have engulfed English. That didn't happen. Why not?
One critical reason was that, because of particular historical events, French speakers in
England became cut off from their cultural and linguistic roots. In 1 204, the reigning
monarch, John, king of Normandy, Aquitaine, and England, Iost his Norman lands in a war
with the much smaller kingdom of France. The Norman dukedoms, ancestral lands of
William the Conqueror and cultural homelands, were part of another empire now. As long as
the French nobility and middle classes who lived in England kept contact with their
homelands in Normandy, as long as they thought of themselves as French and married within
French families, their identity and language were secure. When they lost their connections
across the channel, their language began to lose its grip on English. One thing that happened
was that French speakers, even within
the noblest families, began to look for wives not from across the channel but in England.
They married English speakers, and in doing so, they married, as it were, into the English
language as well. It's said that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. It's likely that
by the middle of the 1 3th century, many children in families which would previously have
been French-speaking were learning English from their mothers or nurses.
[Singing in Old English]
BRAGG:
No doubt many of the children of Anglo-French marriages grew up bilingual, perhaps
speaking one language to the servants in the castle kitchen and another at dinner in the great
hall.
By 1250, there's even some evidence that children of the nobility were having to learn
French from a written primer, grappling with the vocabulary of what was becoming
effectively a foreign language.

By the middle of the 13th century, more and more French speakers throughout society were
themselves beginning to speak English, becoming bilingual. The result was that, while
French itself became
more of a foreign language, French vocabulary, French words, continued to stream into
English. Many more words are recorded after 1 250 than before. Abbey, attire, censer,
defend, figure, malady, music, parson, plead, sacrifice, scarlet, spy, stable, virtue, marshal,
park, reign, beauty, clergy, cloak, country, fool, heir, pillory. And because French was the
international language of trade, it acted as a conduit for words from the markets of the East,
Arabic words that gave to the English saffron, mattress, hazard, camphor, alchemy, lute,
amber, and syrup. Our phrase "checkmate" comes, through French, from the Arab "shah
mat", "The king is dead." As we've heard, very often, the imports didn't replace existing
English words, but settled down with them, each word adopting a slightly different meaning.
The same thing had happened with English and Old Norse, this layering effect. So, a young
English hare came to be named by the French word "leveret". English, swan. French, cygnet.
A small English axe is a French hatchet. "Ask", English, and "demand", from French, have
slightly different meanings, 00:25:03,435 — > 00:25:06,927
as do "bit" and "morsel", "wish" and "desire", "might" and "power", "room" and "chamber".
On the surface,
some of these words appear to be interchangeable, and sometimes they are. But more
interestingly,
there are fine differences. That's the beauty of it. "Answer" is not quite "respond". "Begin"
isn't always "commence". "Liberty" isn't always "freedom". Shades of meaning, representing
new shades of thought, were massively absorbed into our language at that time.
The range of what I would call "almost synonyms" became one of the glories of English,
contributing to the language's precision and flexibility, allowing its speakers and writers over
the centuries to select, very precisely, the right word. Rather than replace English, French
was helping equip and enrich the language for the central role that it was on its way to
reassuming. Towards the end of the 13th century, a new idea of the English people was being
born.
The Norman lands across the channel were a foreign country now. Even the families who
traced their roots back to William the Conqueror's Norman followers, men with French
names and French blood, started calling themselves true-born Englishmen. Behind me is the
tomb of Edward I. "The Hammer of the Scots,"
it says there in Latin. Latin was the language of official business, but when the French king
Philip threatened invasion of England in 1295, Edward used the English language as a
symbol of nationhood to galvanise support. "If Philip is able to do all the evil he means to,
from which God protect us, he plans to wipe out
our English language entirely from the Earth," he said. The old language, reborn, could now
be a rallying point for a new mongrel people. The invasion never came.

And though Edward made the English language a symbol for the country, he didn't elevate it
to official use. Latin and French were still the languages of state affairs. It was Edward's
direct ancestor,
William the Conqueror,

who, more than two centuries before, had enshrined Latin and French as the written
languages of state, banishing English. But as the 1 3th century gave way to the 14th, English
was becoming the one
language out of the three that everyone in the country could be counted on to know. In 1 325,
for instance, the chronicler William of Nassyngton could write...
MAN: Latin can no-one speak, I trow
But those who it from school do know
And some know French, but not Latin
Who're used to court and dwell therein
And some know Latin, though just in part
Whose use of French is less than art
And some can understand English
Who neither Latin know, nor French
But unlettered or learned, old or young
All understand the English tongue.
[Man singing in Old English]
BRAGG: And around the country, written English was emerging from the shadows. Songs in
the French troubadour style but with English words appeared, as did a few vernacular poems.
In some places, the Old English religious homilies had continued to be copied and circulated.
The bestiary, in which birds and animals were portrayed and their behaviour made the basis
for lessons in Christian morality, was a particular medieval form. They were usually written,
as here, in Latin, but in a late 1 3th century example, the text is not in Latin but in English.
MAN: The wild deer has two properties. He draws out the viper from the stone with his nose
and swallows it. The venom causes the deer to burn. Then he rushes to the water and
drinks... The devil is like the whale.
He tempts men to follow their sinful lusts, and, in return, they find ruin. It is the weak in
faith, the little ones
that he thus beguiles.
BRAGG: And it was an animal which, in just a few years' time,
would, by a cruel twist of fate, give English its greatest boost yet. A small, black rodent with
a Latin name. Rattus rattus. The black rat. In 1348, ancestors of these black rats deserted a
ship that, coming from the Continent, had docked near Weymouth. They carried a deadly
cargo, a germ that modern science calls
pasteurella pestis, that the 1 4th century named the Great Pestilence, and that we know as the
Black Death. Plague had come to Britain.
Infected rats carried the deadly germ east, then north. They sought out human habitations,
building nests in the floors, climbing the wattle-and-daub walls, shedding the infected fleas
that fed on their blood, and transmitted bubonic plague. It's been estimated that between a
quarter and a third of England's population
of 4 million died. In some places, whole communities were wiped out. This is Ashwell in
Hertfordshire. In the bell tower of the church, some desperate soul, perhaps the parish priest,
scratched a poignant record
on the wall in bad Latin.

MAN: The first pestilence was in 1 350, minus one. 1 350. Pitiless, wild, violent.
Only the dregs of the people live to tell the tale.
"The dregs" were those of the English-speaking peasantry who had survived.
Though the Black Death was a human catastrophe, it set in train a series of social upheavals
which would speed the English language along the road to full restoration as the real and
recognised language of the nation.
[Choir singing]
For one thing, the Black Death dealt Latin, the language of the church, a body blow. Where
people lived communally, as the clergy did in monasteries and other religious orders, the
incidence of infection and death was disproportionately high. At a local level, many parish
priests either caught the plague from tending their parishioners or simply ran away.
As a result of the plague, the Latin-speaking clergy in some parts of England were reduced
by almost a half. Many of their replacements were barely literate laymen whose only
language was English. England after the Black Death was a very different place. In many
parts of the country, there was hardly anyone left to work the land or tend the livestock. The
acute shortage of labour meant that those who did the work had the power to break from
their feudal past and demand better conditions, higher wages. Times were changing. Wages
rose. The price of property fell.
Working people seized the opportunities they'd never had before. The fortunes of the
common
people were changing. They were rising through society, and they took their English with
them. By 1 385, English had replaced French in the schoolroom, and as education and
literacy spread, so did the demand for books in English. And English was already finding a
place in the state and in the law. In 1 362, for the first time in three centuries, English was
acknowledged as a language of official business. Since the conquest, court cases had been
heard in French. Now the law recognized that too few people understood that language,
probably because many of the educated lawyers had died in the plague. From now on, it was
declared, cases could be pleaded, showed, defended, debated, and judged in English.
In the same year, 1362, Parliament was opened here at Westminster. For the first time ever,
the chancellor addressed the assembly not in French, but in English.
MAN: For the worship and honour of God, King Edward had summoned his prolates, dukes,
earls, barons, and other lords of his realm to his Parliament, holden at Westminster the year
of the King...
And soon, English would once again be the language of kings. The country hadn't had an
English-speaking monarch since Harold had been hacked to death at Hastings in 1 066.
In 1399, King Richard II was deposed by Henry, Duke of Lancaster. Parliament was
summoned here, to
the Great Hall at Westminster. The dukes and lords, spiritual and temporal, were assembled.
The royal throne, draped in cloth of gold, stood empty. Then Henry stepped forward, crossed
himself, and claimed the crown.

And in a great symbolic moment, he made his speech not in the Latin language of state
business or the French language of the royal household but in what the official history calls
his mother tongue, English.
In the name of the Fadir, Son, and Holy Gost,
l, Henry of Lancaster,
chalenge this rewme of Yngland
and the corone
with all the membres
and the appurtenances,
als I that am disendit
be right lyne of the blode
comyng fro the gude lorde
Kyng Henry Therde,
and thorghe that ryght that God
of his grace hath sent me,
with the helpe of my kyn and
of my frendes, to recover it...
the whiche rewme
was in poynt to be undone
for defaut of governance
and undoyng of the gode lawes.
BRAGG: And so Henry, Duke of Lancaster, became King Henry IV, and English was once
again a royal language. The tide seemed to be turning in its favour. By the end of the 14th
century, it was on course
to regain its status as the first language of the country. And now it also had a literary
champion who could harness its full capabilities to produce great writing, Geoffrey Chaucer.
MAN: Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye
that slepen al the night with open ye
so priketh hem Nature in hir corages;
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

Chaucer wrote those opening, showery lines to "The Canterbury Tales" more than six
centuries ago
in 1387. For millions of people since, "The Canterbury Tales" have been the flowering of the
medieval English language and also a great staging post for English literature. Chaucer,
pictured here as one of his own pilgrims, wasn't the only writer of his time and he didn't
invent the language he was working with.
But he, more than any other, recognised its richness, the potential in having at his disposal
vocabularies from high and low society, drawn from French and Old English, and he worked
it to the full. Chaucer was a Londoner and an important man, with connections to the royal
family and a high position in the civil service.
He'd travelled widely, perhaps even been a spy, and he knew Latin and French. He might
have been expected, like many other English poets of the time, to write in either of those
languages for an exclusive audience, but he didn't. He chose to write in English, the English
that was spoken in London.
LOWE: Language of London would have been a huge mixture. You've got people coming in
from the Central Midlands, from the Northern Midlands. From the Northern Midlands, they'd
have been bringing more Scandinavian terms because it's an area of strong Scandinavian
settlement, but we'd have also have heard French loan words, which people would have
heard in literature as well. So it's a vibrant variety of English.
[Folk music plays]
MAN: Bifil that in that seson on a day,
In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye...
This is where the Tabard Inn used to stand.
Now it's the rather dismal
backyard of Guy's Hospital.
This is where Chaucer's pilgrims gather before setting out on their pilgrimage to Canterbury.
The buildings may have gone, but Chaucer's characters, a cannily constructed cross-section
of medieval society, live on in his writing.
MAN: A knyght ther was and that a worthy man,
that fro the tyme that he first bigan
To riden out, he loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour...
Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse,
That of hir smylyng was ful symple and coy;
A Marchant was ther with a forked berd,
In mottelee, and hye on horse he sat;
A good Wif was ther of biside Bathe,
But she was somdel deef, and that was scathe.
The Millere was a stout carl for the nones;
Ful byg he was of brawn and eek of bones.
BRAGG: The pilgrims set off for Canterbury, a journey of about three days then, and, to
pass the time, they told each other stories. The stories have a range of styles, from serious
moral fables to bawdy farces with episodes that wouldn't be out of place in a "Carry On"
film. What Chaucer did most brilliantly was to choose and tailor his language to suit every
tale and its teller. The creation of mood and tone and the realisation of
characters through the language is something we expect of writers today, so it's difficult to
realise how extraordinary it was when Chaucer did it. He showed, he proved, that reformed
English was fit for great literature, which gives him a key part in our story.

This gentil cok hadde in his governaunce

Sevene hennes, for to doon al his plesaunce
Whiche were his sustres and his paramours,
And wonder lyk to him, as of colours;
Of whiche the faireste hewed on hir throte
Was cleped fayre damoysele Pertelote.

Can you tell us what language is predominating in this particular passage?

Well, you've got so many French words, haven't you?
They really hit you between the eyes.
Even today, I think, you'd notice them. "Gouvernance", "plaisance", "paramour". In fact,
Chaucer is thought to be the person who introduced "paramour" into the English language
himself. And those words, "plaisance", "gouvernance", all appear from about the 1350s, so
they're quite new at a time when Chaucer used them in the "Nun's Priest Tale". Question is,
of course, "Why is he doing this?" Well, it's odd really, isn't it, because this is a story about
chickens. It's a story about a cock and his hens, and you'd have thought that perhaps a less
refined language might be in order. But Chaucer is playing with the whole idea of an exulted
style, and so he's investing these hens and cocks with a feeling of great literary quality. You
know,
it becomes almost a mock epic.
BRAGG: Chaucer not only used existing French words for poetic effect, he also introduced
his own elevated synonyms, sometimes bypassing an English word in favour of a more
stylish French borrowing. So, English had the perfectly good "hard" as a noun. Chaucer
borrowed the French word "difficulte". In place of "unhap", he gave us "disadventure". For
"shendship", "dishoneste". For "building", "edifice". For "unconning", "ignoraunt". And for
"meaning", "signifiaunce". But Chaucer wasn't just ensnared
with the elegance of French. He also cherished the directness and earthiness of English and
used it, for example, in "The Miller's Tale", where the student Absolon's midnight
assignation with a neighbour's wife doesn't go quite according to plan.

This Absolon gan wype his mouth ful drie.

Derk was the nyght as pich, or as the cole,
And at the wyndow out she putte hir hole,
And Absolon, hym fil ne bet ne wers,
But with his mouthe he kiste hir naked ers.

The language, of course, is predominantly Old English, and, again, Chaucer is aware of what
linguists would call register. He knows that you have to have a particular style for a
particular purpose. With "The Miller's Tale", we have both the miller himself, who is a man
of extraordinary qualities, so he opens doors simply by
running at them with his head, which was a clever trick. And the story itself is, as you know,
about bottoms out of windows and other such things, and, of course, in that case, it's
appropriate to have a simple, earthy style. He knows that if he's talking about basic earthy
stuff, he might as well use good Old English words. And I think it's actually marked that use
by not using many French words. I think people would have picked up on that. We certainly
do. The style seems very direct, almost colloquial. Of course, that's literally artifice,
but it does seem direct and colloquial, and that's as a complete result of the way in which he's
using the language, the language he'd have heard on the streets. Words like "ers" meaning
"arse", I'm afraid, and other such rude words.
BRAGG: Scholars dispute how much vocabulary Chaucer actually introduced into English.
With Old English, he certainly reintroduced words which hadn't been written down since
before 1100, probably because they weren't considered important or seemly enough. Words
like "cherlish", "ferting", "frendli", "lerninge", "lovinge", "restless", "swiven", "wasp",
"wifli", and "willingli".
[Choir singing]
This is where the pilgrims who had beguiled the miles with their various tales would have
been making for, the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. The brilliant
archbishop, son of a French merchant, had been brutally murdered in 1170 by knights acting
on the wishes, if not instructions, of Henry Il, that first Plantagenet whose wife, Eleanor, had
done so much to promote the courtly French language which Chaucer
was now mining so expertly.
[Bells chiming]
In Chaucer's day, this area around the Cathedral and the nearby streets would have been
thronged with pilgrims from all over the country. Well, the thronging hasn't changed. But
they would have been speaking in the dialect of their homes. English wasn't uniform in the
way it was spoken,
and Chaucer himself, in "The Reeve's Tale", gives us literature's first "funny Northerner"
who speaks with flat vowels. He says "heem" for "home", "knau" for "know", "gang" for
"gone" and "nan" for "none".
All pronunciations that would be quite understandable in the northeast of England today.
Chaucer himself worried about whether his work would be mispronounced or wrongly
copied or just misunderstood in other parts of the country. He bids one of his poems,
"Troilus and Cressida", a rather worried farewell, voicing a concern he must also have felt
for "The Canterbury Tales".
Go, litel bok.
And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,
So prey God that noon myswrite the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge.
And red wherso thow be, or elles songe,
That thow be understonde
I God beseche!

BRAGG: Of course, Chaucer's books, particularly "The Canterbury Tales", were understood.
His language, the language of late 14th century London, would become, with some later
modifications, the standard form of English. And his genius in harnessing that language to
serve his vision as a writer would guarantee that it lived on. A century and a half after his
death, Geoffrey Chaucer was famous enough for this tomb to be put in Westminster Abbey.
In the intervening years, his tales had spread round the country and delighted listeners and
readers ranging from London merchants to the future Richard III. Before the 1 5th century
was out, "The Canterbury Tales" had been printed by William Caxton, ensuring the future of
Chaucer's work
and furthering the process by which southern English, Chaucer's English, would become the
standard. Chaucer was the first poet to be buried here in what's become Poet's Corner. It's
appropriate for the man
who not only entertained and delighted in his own work, but who, through expanding the
capabilities of the English language, created a standard and a platform for those who
followed.